I was reading an old booklet of my dad's, "The Man with no Country". I read in the introduction that the author was a member of the Sanitary Commission of the US. I looked this up and this term came for UK and it is the care for sick and wounded soldiers. This reference was for our Civil War. England's was for the Crimean War.

I did not learn when this term went out of favor. It seems a strange designation. I would guess our US version changed to the Veterans Administration.

A quick Google search on "Sanitary Commission" "Crimean War" led me to articles like those here and here.

It is clear from those that the original use of the term relates specifically to an initiative to improve hygiene in a Crimean military hospital, and not to an organization like the US Veterans Administration (VA), whose remit encompasses a much wider set of functions connected with the welfare of ex-military personnel.

The United States Sanitary Commission was a private relief agency created by federal legislation on June 18, 1861, to support sick and wounded soldiers of the U.S. Army during the American Civil War.[1] It operated across the North, raised an estimated $25 million in Civil War era revenue (assuming 1865 dollars, $385.16 million in 2015) and in-kind contributions,[2] to support the cause, and enlisted thousands of volunteers. The president was Henry Whitney Bellows, and Frederick Law Olmsted acted as executive secretary. It was modeled on the British Sanitary Commission, set up during the Crimean War, and from the British parliamentary report published after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.[3]

Bostridge points out that in the early 1880s Nightingale wrote an article for a textbook in which she advocated strict precautions designed, she said, to kill germs. Nightingale's work served as an inspiration for nurses in the American Civil War. The Union government approached her for advice in organising field medicine. Although her ideas met official resistance, they inspired the volunteer body of the United States Sanitary Commission. (Source: Wikipedia)

This was good memory on my part as I had recently watched a doco on Florence N about her use of statistics to support her claims. It spoke at length about her use of diagrams to present data.